But, undoubtedly, the too quick transitions of a susceptible fancy from—

often irritated and even offended not only the dull, but the serious. And yet in life, as in literature, is there more than one step in the descent from the sublime to the ridiculous?

Like all celebrated wits, he suffered both from the ascription of his own bons mots to others, and from those of others being fathered upon him. Thus the “without a redeeming vice” (about Lord Hatherley) was his, not Westbury’s, while the “dinner all cold except the ices,” was said not by him, but by Sir David Dundas. His pithy sentences were simply one manifestation of his naturally laconic turn of mind.

He was occasionally over-adroit, especially in his desire to gain distinguished recruits for his party; and he sometimes, perhaps, magnified the machinations of secret conspiracies, although their hidden tyranny was gauged by him with unerring instinct. His predilection both in art and nature was for extremes. Full of atmosphere himself, he owned the social nerves which suffer overmuch from lack of it in others. He detested bores, those masterpieces of nature’s bad art. One of them (if I may say so without disrespect to his kindness and amiability, since departed) has told with artless humour how at one of the last dinner-parties that Lord Beaconsfield attended, he engaged him in conversation, but was pained to notice how ill and absent he seemed. Suddenly, however, on the arrival of a distinguished guest, a Russian diplomatist, the great man brightened and grew young again, as if by miracle!

After his elevation to the peerage,41 when he would often revisit the “glimpses of the moon,” and watch new members with rapt interest, on one occasion he listened patiently to a long speech of ideal dreariness from the lips of one unknown to him. He inquired, as usual, who the speaker was, and learned that Mr. —— had no other peculiarity but deafness. “Poor fellow!” he sighed, “and yet he seems unaware of his natural advantages. He cannot hear himself speak.”

Of Disraeli’s attitude towards fashionable society, as well as towards that which really fascinated him, I shall say more in my eighth chapter; but one incident of his old age must be presented here. I can vouch for it, since it was told me by an eye-witness—a political opponent.

It was after “Peace with honour”42—after he had “descended from the Teutonic chariot,” after the congress where he discovered the alternative Russian map of Bulgaria, concealed by diplomacy, where he earned Bismarck’s undying praise and admiration. The scene was a magnificent reunion in an historic mansion. All the fine flower of society was gathered in a galaxy of splendour and of grandeur. In one of the saloons a brilliant crowd was awaiting Lord Beaconsfield’s entry. As the big doors opened, a thrill went through them. Haughty ladies in the feeling of the moment made obeisance as if to royalty, while that pale figure with the inscrutable smile passed along their serried ranks. Unmoved and immovable, he went straight forward, his eyes fixed on the future, scarcely conscious of their presence, except for his recognition of their homage.

Such are some of his leading features. They combine and reconcile the seeming contradictions of a nature at once calm and impetuous, deep and light, astute and far-seeing in affairs of importance; in trifles, careless. These contrasts, united by genius, pursue the forms of his mind—his ideas. He was, of course, no monster of consistency, but the ideas that animated his actions and utterance sprang from a singularly consistent outlook and a most definite personality. In every case they were the outcome on the one hand of his race, on the other of his nationality. The antithesis between nationality and mere race is most important, and too often ignored. There is no such thing as a nation of a single strain. The national idea is the fusion of reconcilable races, the creation of an artificial and ideal individuality, of a consolidating pattern; the absorption of discordant races and their replacement by a central idea which subordinates instinct to society. Later civilisation means little else, if we reflect, than a gradual process of this description; and it is not a little curious that the distinctive greatness of English literature is largely due to the admission and naturalisation of foreign influences—to England’s free trade in ideas, to the openness of her literary ports. What would it have proved had it remained purely insular; if Italy, France, and Germany had not infused both form and spirit; above all, if it had not been inspired by the noble rhythm of the Englished Bible and by the supreme models of Greece and Rome? Disraeli’s wit, which is to find a due consideration hereafter, is half eighteenth century in form, half talmudic. The shape of his ideas was also partly determined by the time of his birth and by the circumstances of his home.

He was born at the parting of the ways. His early reading, and, indeed, his cast of mind, were steeped in the style of the eighteenth century; but the movements of the nineteenth, the significance of the French Revolution and of Napoleon, who had made all things new, simmered in him from the first, and his earliest reflections were how to attune the democratic idea to the vital institutions of an ancient empire. As regards his home, he was truly, as he has put it, “born in a library;” and this circumstance contributed as much as others to a certain detachment of thought which in politics afforded him the clue to the character of movements, and, above all, to the movements of character; in fiction, as will be apparent from my ninth chapter, it led him to regard things as they appeared of themselves, and not always as they seemed to others; while under the play of fancy he transposed their outward environments to accentuate their essence. Of his father, himself a most interesting study, I shall have more to say in my eighth chapter. Here, I only wish to draw attention to the fact that Isaac Disraeli’s influence on his son’s ideas was twofold. On the one hand, his views on “predisposition,” on the use of solitude, on the true meaning of education, on historical “cause and pretext,” on the hollowness of “joint-stock felicity,” on the self-recognition of creative minds before their late acknowledgment by contemporaries, with others glanced at in my later chapters, were directly derived by Disraeli from his father. From him, too, he inherited his fondness for Burke. On the other hand, Disraeli’s native leanings reacted against many of that peripatetic philosopher’s opinions. His interpretation of the Bible was, if not at variance with, at any rate different from his father’s,43 and was, I fancy, shared by his sister. His admiration for Bolingbroke, as genius and constitutional interpreter, was in direct opposition, just as that father’s own dispassionate outlook remained independent and often the reverse of his own early associations. Byron, however, entered Disraeli’s mental being through his father; and of three main influences on his boyhood—the Bible, Bolingbroke, and Byron (strange conjunction!), the last was not the least.

Outside politics, the contradictions combined in Disraeli’s mind are patent throughout his fiction, and they were reconciled by his leading idea that everything great in the world springs from individuality alone. Thus, for example, as regards Destiny, he was both for free will and fatalism—the individual will was for him the universal fate. If a man, he has said, is ready to die for an object, he must attain it unless he has utterly miscalculated his powers. Then again, the twin sympathies of his mind, both with antique authority and modern revolution, its bias towards the Chartism of Sybil, the chivalry of her aristocratic deliverer, and the discipline of her time-honoured creed, towards the noble personality of “Theodora” in Lothair (his finest heroine),44 and the noble ideals of “Coningsby”—these are reconciled by the national idea, the idea that sets earned privilege and reciprocal duties above and against illimitable and irresponsible “rights.” “Conspiracies are for aristocrats, not for nations.”

In this regard it is most interesting to observe the influence of Shelley on Disraeli—a subject which has been treated by Dr. Richard Garnett in a masterly monograph.45 From many of his conclusions I dissent, but his facts are most enlightening, and form an entrancing comment on the character of “Herbert” in Venetia. He shows that probably through Trelawny, whom he met often at Lady Blessington’s, Disraeli gleaned many recollections and even thoughts and words, unpublished till the Shelley Papers were given to the world some years afterwards; that his description too of the ethereal poet as “a golden phantom” is probably Trelawny’s own; that subtle shades of admiring appreciation are to be traced throughout; that Disraeli was undoubtedly influenced by Shelley’s thoughts. The discovery of these in some portions of the Revolutionary Epick (where “Demogorgon” is introduced) does not seem to me conclusive; nor are the verbal resemblances singled out for comparison very striking. I cannot close this branch of my subject without noticing a fact almost unknown. In 1825, when Disraeli was a stripling, he published an anonymous pamphlet, which may be found in the British Museum, on the restrictions enforced by the Government upon the British working of American mines. The tract is boldly dedicated “by a sincere admirer” to Canning,46 as “one who has reformed without bravery or scandal of former times or persons; asking counsel of both times; of the ancient times that which is best, of the modern times, that which is fittest;” and it further contains this remarkable passage, if we remember its date, about America—

“... The prosperity of England mainly depends upon its relations with America, and in proportion as the energies of America are developed and her resources strengthened, will the power and prosperity of England be confirmed and increased.”

In the domain of politics Disraeli, as I shall show at length, divined in the national institutions the chief engine for the revival of unity and for social regeneration. When he denounced the Conservatism of the early ’forties as an “organised hypocrisy,” he did so just because, as it seemed to his eyes, the hopes once centred on Peel as the restorer of a truly “national” party were being shattered by his failure, under ordeal, to govern, to develop the institutions which he was called on to preserve, by his erection of “registration” into a party idol, by his policy of polls, by his cold indifference and suspicion of the youthful regenerators, who confronted the middle classes with the middle ages. “Whenever,” indignantly urged Disraeli in 1845, “whenever the young men of England allude to any great principle of political or parliamentary conduct, are they to be recommended to go to a railway committee?” And he found in his once chief’s temperament of discouraging formality and timorous desire for “fixity of tenure,” for staying power, a reason for the stultification of the House of Lords: “... It is not Radicalism; it is not the revolutionary spirit of the nineteenth century which has consigned ‘another place’ to illustrious insignificance; it is ‘Conservatism’ and a Conservative dictator.”

Disraeli was one born with aristocratic perceptions, yet with a bent “popular” rather than “democratic” in the strict sense of those terms. “Democracy” in the concrete he considered as the unsettlement of compact nationality through the undue preponderance of a single class; democracy in the abstract he considered as a lever for ambitious tribunes. But the welfare of the people was ever his chief concern, and he knew full well that it is constantly foiled by the side-aims of those vociferous on its behalf. When he first appeared on the political horizon, neither of the great historical parties owned popular sympathies. The Tories dreaded “Radicalism” because they were blind to the possibilities of its adoption into the order of the State. Of the Whigs, democratic enthusiasms were at once the tools and the abhorrence. Disraeli determined to infuse them into those free yet settled institutions of which the Tories were the natural but forgetful guardians. His main purpose from the outset was to implant the new ideas of freedom on the ancient soil of order; to engraft them productively without uprooting the native undergrowth; to harmonise the modern democratic idea with those English traditions which had always harboured its older forms. His work was to accommodate federal to feudal principles; to render democracy in England national and natural; to popularise leadership; to make democracy aristocratic in the truest sense of the term; to undo the closed aristocracy of caste and to revive the open aristocracy of excellence wherever displayed. My next two chapters investigate this idea; and it will be found afterwards, when I discuss his notion of empire and his attitude towards our colonies, that his ideals of Great Britain’s destiny and responsibility flow straight from this ruling outlook. The same consideration applies to the many other problems which I shall discuss in the light of Disraeli’s relations to them. Throughout, in one form or another, and in many applications, the free play of responsible individuality forms the keynote. He constantly opposes it alike to the barren uniformity of republican models, and to the centralising dictatorship whether of groups or of tyrants. He contrasts the personal with the mechanical. The State in his eyes should prove the sympathetic expression of the whole community. These aspects will find ample exposition hereafter. In this place I wish only to quote their bold and broad emphasis in the unfamiliar pamphlet of What is he? with one citation from which I opened this chapter. It will explain those passages in his Runnymede Letters and The Spirit of Whiggism, where he expects and adjures Peel to head a “national party” and to replace confederacies by a creed. It will also illustrate that passage in the election address to High Wycombe during 1832, which preludes his mission as the renewer of a popular Conservatism. “... Englishmen, behold the unparalleled empire raised by the heroic energies of your fathers, rouse yourselves in this hour of doubt and danger, rid yourselves of all that political jargon and factious slang of Whig and Tory, two names with one meaning, used only to delude you, and unite in forming a great national party....”

“The first object of a statesman,” he says (and he was then barely twenty-nine years of age), “is a strong Government, without which there can be no security. Of all countries in the world, England most requires one, since the prosperity of no society so much depends upon public confidence as that of the British nation.”

He then declares that the old principle of exclusion (common alike to the Whig oligarchs and the debased Toryism of Eldon) is dead.

“... The moment the Lords passed the Reform Bill from menace instead of conviction, the aristocratic principle of government in this country, in my opinion, expired for ever.” The democratic principle becomes necessary to maintain a Government at all. “If the Tories,” he continues, “indeed despair of restoring the aristocratic principle, and are sincere in their avowal that the State cannot be governed with the present machinery, it is their duty to coalesce with the Radicals,47 and permit both political nicknames to merge into the common, the intelligible, and the dignified title of a national party.”48

He proceeds to prove in a few decisive strokes that the towns are now the safeguards against any military invasion of rights, and that a coalition between the then Whigs and the then Tories is impossible; the only alternative, therefore, is the inclusion of the democratic principle.

“Without being a system-monger,” he resumes, repeating the refrain of his previous Revolutionary Epick, “I cannot but perceive that the history of Europe for three hundred years has been a transition from feudal to federal principles.” If not their origin, these contending principles have blended with all the struggles that have occurred.—“The revolt of the Netherlands impelled, if it did not produce, our revolution against Charles I. That of the Anglo-American colonies impelled, if it did not produce, the Revolution in France.” “This,” he says, “is not a party pamphlet, and appeals to the passions of no order of the State.” “It is wise,” he concludes, “to be sanguine in public as well as in private life; yet the sagacious statesman must view the present portents with anxiety, if not with terror. It would sometimes appear that the loss of our colonial empire must be the necessary consequence of our prolonged domestic discussions. Hope, however, lingers to the last. In the sedate but vigorous character of the British nation we may place great confidence.” The very pressing unsettlement of those days will afterwards claim a mention; nor should I now omit Disraeli’s sentence in his Crisis Examined, to the effect that “Lord Grey refusing the Privy Seal and Lord Brougham soliciting the Chief Barony” were “two epigrammatic episodes in the history of reform that never can be forgotten.”

Mr. John Morley has well observed that about all Disraeli’s utterance there was something spacious. The ideas that I am about to examine are not to be brushed away by the sneers of triflers. Whatever may be thought of them, and however they may fairly be encountered by criticism, dissented from or condemned by judgment, they are still alive. Disraeli bathed the political landscape in a large and luminous atmosphere. To literature, as I shall hope to show, he lent a fresh and original charm. Over existence he never ceased to spread the glow of endeavour, of aspiration, and of purpose. His heart was with the youth and the labour of England. He made for the strength and union of every divergent class. He struck and stirred the national imagination.

Disraeli’s sincerity was that of a master in the world’s studio, imbuing the fainter shapes around him with the vivid colours of the true pictures in his own brain. It was that, also, of a great man of action who translates dreams into deeds. It is not often that the literary mind is allied to a practical bent. He himself has reminded us that such an union—“as in the case of Caius Julius”—is irresistible. He was always himself, and never under “the dangerous sympathy with the creations of others.” He believed that “every man performs his office, and there is a Power, greater than ourselves, that disposes of all this.”49

Disraeli’s European prominence is evidenced through the space occupied by the polyglot literature relating to him in the book catalogue alone of the British Museum. It extends to eleven of those huge pages. His importance at home before he became pre-eminent is shown by a shower of virulent abuse.

Science assures us that the difference between life and death is that the former holds the powers of growth and reproduction, while inanimateness is incapable of either. A great man is surely one who possesses and imparts these qualities of life. Disraeli, without question, powerfully affected the thought of his generation and the destinies of the future.